Title: Green Investment and Launch Timing Under Advance Information: Diffusion
Dynamics
Speaker: Aziza Rafiq
Advisor: Prof. Nesim K. Erkip
Co-Advisor: Prof. Emre Nadar
Date & Time: Tuesday, June 23, 2026, at 9:15 a.m.
Place: EA202
This is an online seminar. To request event details please send a message to department.
ABSTRACT:
This thesis studies the joint optimization of greenness investment and product launch timing in diffusion-based markets, incorporating advance information about forthcoming green products.
Motivated by growing regulatory pressure and rising consumer environmental awareness, we develop a unified framework in which a firm simultaneously chooses the environmental
performance and market entry time of a next-generation green product. The underlying model features a convex greening cost that declines with launch delay and an aggregate market-size constraint linking successive product generations.
We evaluate three distinct market settings. First, when a firm introduces the next-generation green product as a standalone offering, a two-stage substitution structure emerges: the firm adjusts greenness as the primary demand lever until the market-size cap binds, after which launch timing becomes the sole margin of adjustment. Second, if the firm already markets a conventional brown product, that incumbent offering acts as a demand multiplier: customer migration and leapfrogging generate green adoption without heavy R&D, prompting the firm to launch the green product earlier and invest less in its environmental performance. Finally, introducing advance information reveals that pre-launch disclosure and greenness investment function as strategic substitutes: the value of information is highest precisely when greenness investment is least effective.
A comparison across these settings introduces the equivalent information level and a dominance map that identifies when advance information can substitute for an existing market presence and when the incumbent advantage is structural and difficult to replicate. This substitution is possible mainly in markets with short product cycles or modest incumbent advantage.
BIO:
Aziza Rafiq received her B.S. degree in Industrial Engineering from Bilkent University in June
2024. She is currently pursuing an M.S. degree in the Department of Industrial Engineering at
Bilkent University under the supervision of Prof. Nesim K. Erkip and Prof. Emre Nadar. Her
current research focuses on green investment and launch timing decisions under advance
information in diffusion-based product adoption models.